Prime Minister Najib Razak said Thursday he had ordered the Malaysian navy and coastguard to conduct search and rescue operations for boats carrying stricken migrants including ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar.

"I have further ordered (the) Royal Malaysian Navy and Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency to conduct search and rescue efforts for Rohingya boats. We have to prevent loss of life," Najib said on his Facebook account.

Canada is to hold a national conference to discuss ways of preventing young people from pursuing jihadism following the arrest of 10 youths attempting to join the Islamic State group, officials said Wednesday.

A spokesman for Minister of Public Safety Steven Blaney said no date had been set for the meeting, which would bring together officials from all Canadian provinces to discuss prevention strategies.

Five people were killed and eight others were wounded Wednesday in a clash between armed groups in Mexico's violence-plagued southern state of Guerrero, officials said.

The federal government said in a brief statement that the army was deployed to the municipality of Tlacotepec to provide security and that three large weapons and four vehicles were seized.

Denied their traditional route out of poverty in the Gulf and often urged on by relatives, growing numbers of young Bangladeshis are joining the waves of Rohingya trying to reach Southeast Asia on horror boat journeys.

As the plight of millions has worsened in Bangladesh in recent years, smugglers organizing the perilous sea voyages have grown increasingly sophisticated, keen to cash in on their misery.

South Korean President Park Geun-Hye on Thursday selected her justice minister to become the new prime minister -- a post that has become something of a poisoned chalice under her administration.

Hwang Kyo-Ahn, 58, was named as the new prime minister after his predecessor, Lee Wan-Koo, was implicated in a major bribery scandal and forced to quit in April after serving only two months.

A Swiss court has ordered an Israeli oil firm to pay Iran $1.1 billion in compensation over a joint venture from before the 1979 Islamic revolution, state news agency IRNA said Thursday.

A 78-year-old Canadian man was found dead in a western Mexico lake and two of his elderly countrymen remain missing after they disappeared during a boat trip, officials said Wednesday.

A civil protection official in Chapala, a resort town popular with U.S. and Canadian retirees in Jalisco state, said the three men had left in a sailboat on Monday.

Sierra Leone on Wednesday berated the "selfish and shameful" behavior of people risking a resurgence of the Ebola virus by flouting quarantine restrictions, as authorities announced a spike in cases.

The country's National Ebola Response Center (NERC) spoke out as the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed the west African nation and its neighbor Guinea had seen cases quadruple in a week.

A 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck off the Solomon Islands in the Pacific on Thursday, the U.S. Geological Survey said, but no tsunami warning was issued and no major damage was expected.

The quake hit at a depth of 19 kilometers (11 miles), some 184 kilometers from Lata and 487 kilometers from the capital Honiara. It was followed a smaller 4.9-magnitude aftershock.

A man who landed his mini helicopter on the U.S. Capitol lawn was indicted Wednesday by a federal grand jury and faces six charges relating to the security scare. 

Douglas Hughes, 61, a postal worker from Ruskin, Florida was arrested on April 15 after he landed his gyropcopter on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, the seat of Congress in the heart of Washington.